So screwed 31 December 2011

Amazing Pictures From A Year In The Life Of Barack Obama – Here Obama Prays with the “Circle of Protection Campaign” a group of religious leaders dedicated to preserving government protections for the poor. | Image: White House

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Oh please. A group of multicolored, self-serving, constantly poor-washing trough feeders. If they care at all for the poor it is to rake off what benefits poor people can manage to accrue. And privatise as much as possible. Ensure what used to be benefits assigned to individuals or families, instead, come directly to them.

Hosanna

Cons, would be a shorter description.

And Romney is no peach. I forget where now, but I read somewhere reliable he called the Elders of Zion (the Utah branch) to get permission to add to his big hulking failing health mess of a bill a tiny 50.00 payment toward abortion for the poorest in MA..

So, we get moaning and groaning and Jesus invoking proselytisers from the incumbant OR we get a hot phone on constant re-dial to the Mormon hierarchy before the other one does ANYTHING.

AND Wall Street with a hot poker up both of their rumps. (Not that they mind!)

I think with either administration, the official WH “cheap gift” to no-account visitors one step up from a tour group should be red white and blue lube rather than specially boxed M & Ms.

Like this:

Related

I think with either administration, the official WH “cheap gift” to no-account visitors one step up from a tour group should be red white and blue lube rather than specially boxed M & Ms. – Mcat

With Neapolitan ice cream offered in a tricorn hat..
I envision a day when White House occupants = residents and “visitors” alike – could just be industrially conveyed right on thru the various lubrication,, topping, and accessory applications. Leg-breaking machine throughout the whole manufacture would necessarily handle the requisite bloody Gawdly genuflecting..

I still think we should be allowed to shoot them for free from like a viewing platform or something.. I mean you could regulate it, license and tax it as a revenue stream. 😉 😆
Maybe limit it to a seasonal thing.

I think you are right… he probably was about that size in the Rough Rider era….

Here is a tidbit… I came upon it years ago, in the swell of some ‘gays in the mil’ debate in the country… Apparently when TR was charging up San Juan Hill (if I have that right?) one of the members of his cadre was a cross dresser. S/he would charge up the hill, charge into battle, in full female dress of the period. I think, but am not certain, that I got it from Gore Vidal.

[S]o the Americans are saying: Okay, how do we re-organize the whole thing? The “War on Terror“ for all practical purposes is more or less over in the Pentagon way of seeing the world. Now it’s back to “Full Spectrum Dominance“ – we have to control the whole thing. So this means control of the Mediterranean Sea as a NATO lake, which was what they have implementated in Libya and now will try to implement in Syria; control the rest of Africa, sending troops to Uganda like Obama did a few weeks ago, which is not only Uganda but the heart of Central Africa, it’s Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Congo – lots of oil, lots of minerals, lots of rare earths as well, all extremely precious.

So the West has to be there and the U.S. has to be in control, forget about China. This means raving up AFRICOM, the African Command sitting in Stuttgart, Germany, and soon probably sitting in Benghazi, Libya.

I was talking to people from the European Union in Brussels a few days ago, some smart dissidents who don’t agree with what they are doing, and they told me off the record: Look, there is going to be a military base in Libya, this was the project right from the beginning.

There will not be a lot of European boots on the ground, it’s going to be Turkish, Qatari, UAE, those mercenaries that get trained by Blackwater – now Xe – in the United Arab Emirates, these people will be part of this base and it’s going to be the base that NATO and AFRICOM wanted in North African territory.

For me the number one answer to your question is this: the “War on Terror“ was a diversion that lasted more or less ten years. Now even the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Obama administration, everybody is saying out loud: “al-Qaeda is operationally ineffective” – these are their own words.

Virtually everybody is dead, apart from al-Zawahiri and the new guy that they have named to be their military commander, but I can’t even remember his name, they have a new one every week or so. Everybody is dead, they are not in Afghanistan anymore, they have a few trainers in the tribal areas in the Waziristans, they are ineffective in the rest of the world, though, of course, they are in power now in Tripoli because the West has used them. Those guys were trained in a military camp north of Kabul.

I was there in this place in early 2001, and I was told that they had a lot of Libyans there. And yes, these Libyans were the guys from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG, and they were trained in this camp north of Kabul, it was very easy to go there. So now they are in Libya, the military commander of Tripoli, Abdelhakim Belhadj, with his cohorts, they are very well armed, very well trained, they will not go away, and these al-Qaeda-linked jihadis were used by the West with no second thoughts. . . . . .

Round and round we go… as long as the wars keep going, the arms dealers keep selling, all is fine and God is in his heaven.

He continues to dance around our involvement globally, everywhere we go, with refining and moving drugs. Be interesting to see how long he waits to come out for Slob. Which as much as he took the low path (near silence and support when he had to speak up) in 2008, I suspect he will again.

There should be more of it…. it happened out here, esp as notice of clsing 3-5 Oakland grammar schools came down this fall… and s o m e elements of the various teachers unions and groups did join with Occupy, as well as parents…

Larry O Donnell is starting to dribble out that for the Republicans, Iowa is a matter of voting for the “lesser of two or three evils”.
And was saying how Obama needs to go after those Anti War Republicans and Indies going for Paul..

Larry. WHY?

And flickng over to Fox they are saying Romney has hardly spent any money in Iowa and if he comes in third, well, well, my, my, my..

I flicked back to the MSNBDonksies and they were showing a graf that said entrance polling of the cauci had the Paulites @ 58%, among the 30 somethings… Oh Dear.

Yep, looks like it’s dribbling out.. they seem to be breakin it to us gently: Romney ain’t all that..

It’s all such a sick studio system joke.
The fans pan him in PA., uhm, for CASEY.
Then Frothy Rick, .said to be down on his luck,
goes from 4% to 25 in a week.
It can happen to you!
Marathon Dance for a living!
Whatever you do, HAVE THAT BABY!
Get Married! And Bash the Gays!
Let’s take this country back!
Then off to War – with Iran! Tho ANY WAR ANYWHERE will Do!

Oh I agree… they put a tutu on Santorum and let him pirouette for a little while… it tamps down the loonatick evangels, they think they matter, more than just being a cog in the wheel of elections and exhorting… etc.

Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I suppose. It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more “enlightened” or “rational” than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction.

That is to say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced certain kinds of brutality, cruelty, and injustice. Modern technology makes it far easier to control crime. We have weapons both too terrifying to use in open combat and so precise that we can kill at great distances, without great armies, out of sight and mind. We have succeeded at reforming our own nations internally in ways that make them ever more comfortable, less threatening, and more complacent. Our prison system is barbaric, but not overtly sadistic, and our more draconian laws rarely inconvenience the affluent among us. We have learned to exploit the labor and resources of poorer peoples not by enslaving them, but merely by making them “beneficiaries” of globalization. The violence we commit is more hygienic, subtler, and less inconvenient than that committed by our forebears.

Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

Right from the start, this blog has taken the unpopular line that Greece would end up defaulting within the euro. This would be the worst possible outcome for Greece; it would also be pretty disastrous in terms of market confidence in the euro. But, to repeat, this was never about the economics. If it had been, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

MAN! He must REALLY been into the Secret Santa thing!
Oh I see…. he was Auxilliary bishop. LOL.
With the ole auxilliary family, obviously.
But what do the kids say now?May we still call you Father, Father?
Fuckin lunacy. EVERYWHERE. LOL.

I saw too that some exalted bishop in Canada who admitted to an addiction to child porn (but would one merely be itinerant? Occasional? Wouldn’t that person BE addicted?) has been released from jail or probation or whatever. Hang him upside down! From Toe screws!!

Since it was not the only stream of Occ events… I wonder. Sounds as tho it might be a very very efficient one tho. I have read that the Occ streaming, whoever did it, over usstream, actually had a higher viewership than many cable news shows…

So.

One of the participants in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was a man named Peter Tefft. He was outed by the Twitter group "Yes, You're Racist," which had been posting screenshots of participants in an effort to expose them. His father, Pearce Tefft, has come out and publicly denounced his white supremacist son in an open letter […]

Heather Heyer is the latest casualty in a number of deaths at the hands of white nationalists. Foreign Policy recently published an FBI and Department of Homeland Security bulletin that concluded white supremacist groups were "responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016...more than any other domestic extremist movement." Despite th […]

As President Trump faces growing outrage over his response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, we bring you an exclusive: an interview with the great-great-grandsons of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. At least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy can be found in public spaces across the country. But now a number of the monu […]

In a wide ranging discussion, Nina Turner and Paul Jay focus on the role of Trump, the GOP, corporate Democrats and corporate media in perpetuating systemic racism; they also address whether Nazi's should have a right to organize public rallies

Ecuador's former president Rafael Correa is accusing recently elected president Lenin Moreno of moving the country to the right, using corruption accusations against Vice-President and Correa friend Jorge Glas as cover. TRNN's Greg Wilpert reports

BRIDGEWATER, N.J./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday decried the removal of monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy, echoing white nationalists and drawing stinging rebukes from fellow Republicans in a controversy that has inflamed racial tensions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Republican senators, an approach he may regret if he is someday impeached and the Senate has to weigh charges against him stemming from an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has abandoned plans to create an infrastructure advisory council, the White House said on Thursday, the day after two other advisory groups were dismantled over the furor caused by Trump's remarks on white supremacists.

(Reuters) - Wisconsin's Republican-controlled state Assembly voted 59-30 on Thursday to approve a bill that paves the way for a $3 billion incentives package for a proposed liquid-crystal display plant by Taiwan's Foxconn.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.